reclining position; he turned on Lefevre his
wonderful eyes, which in the mysterious twilight that suffused the
midsummer night burned with a surprising brilliance. Lefevre felt
himself seized and held in their influence.

"Give me your hand," said Julius.

The doctor gave his hand, his eyes being still held by those of Julius,
and instantly, as it seemed to him, he plunged, as a man dives into the
sea, into a gulf of unconsciousness, from which he presently emerged
with something like a gasp and with a tremulous sensation about his
heart. What had happened to him he did not know; but he felt slacker of
fibre, as if virtue had gone out of him, while Julius, when he spoke,
seemed refreshed as by a draught of wine.

"How are you?" asked Julius. "For heaven's sake don't let me think that
at the last I have troubled much the current of your life! Will you have
something to eat and drink? There's wine and food below."

"Thank you; no," said Lefevre. "I am well enough, only a little drowsy."

"I am stronger," said Julius, "but it will not last; so let me finish my
story."

Then he continued. "Having explained to myself, in the way I have told
you, the ease of my unwitting replenishment of force whenever I was
brought low, I set myself to improve on my discovery. I saw before me a
prospect of enjoyment of all the delights of life, deeper and more
constant than most men ever know,--if I could only ensure to myself with
absolute certainty a still more complete and rapid reinvigoration as
often soever as I sank into exhaustion. I was quite sure that no energy
of life is finer or fuller than the human at its best."

"Good God!" exclaimed Lefevre, turning away with an involuntary shudder.

"For heaven's sake!" cried Julius, "don't shrink from me now, or you
will tempt me to be less frank than I have been. I wish to make full
confession. I know, I see now, I have been cruelly, brutally selfish--as
selfish as Nature herself!--none knows that better than I. But remember,
in extenuation, what I have told you of my origin and my growth. And I
had not the suspicion of a thought of injuring any one. Fool! fool!
egregious fool that I was! I who understood most things so clearly did
not guess that no creature, no being in the universe--god, or man, or
beast--can indulge in arrogant, full, magnificent enjoyment without
gathering and living in himself, squandering through himself, the lives
of others, to their eternal loss and his ow